Abstract:Dead-we all have our Graves," Stephen Elliott, a Confederate Episcopal bishop, observed in an 1862 sermon.Every age, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consol...Dead-we all have our Graves," Stephen Elliott, a Confederate Episcopal bishop, observed in an 1862 sermon.Every age, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consolation."Yet in spite of the continuities that Elliott identified in human history, death has its discontinuities as well.Men and women fashion the way they approach the end of life out of their understandings of who they are and what matters to them.And inevitably these understandings are shaped by historical and cultural circumstances, by how others around them regard death, by conditions that vary over time and place.Even though "we all have our Dead" and even though we all die, we are likely to do so quite differently from century to century or even generation to generation, from continent to continent and from nation to nation.1In the middle of the nineteenth century the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865 is approximately equal to American fatalities '[Read More